Sunday, April 27, 2008

Exotica - Carmen Miranda

"With her arrival in New York, she found her speech, accent and mannerisms turned into idiocies by the American media. The American public (and Wittgenstein) loved her for her fractured accent and odd expressions, the inter-language of her songs ans high-speed repartee, part-English, part-Portuguese, part-monkey cries and sound poetry. Men, of course, lusted after her exotic exuberance or, lusting after other men, they dressed in Carmen Miranda outfits." From "Exotica. Fabricated soundscapes in a real world", by David Toop (Serpent's Tail, 1999)

*

"In the 1930s, whenever he felt exhausted and drained from his classes at Cambridge, Ludwig Wittgenstein would go to the cinema with a friend or some student. Ray Monk tells us that he would always sit in the front row, where he could probably immerse himself more completely in the stream of images and sound, and he preferred either westerns or musicals starringthe Portuguese-Brazilian Carmen Miranda." From "Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir", by Norman Malcolm (Oxford University Press, 1958).